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Following on from the compositional ideas I had been developing in my .com pieces (form as content) and Battle pieces (challenge as content), I’m working on a new set of pieces where the choice of instruments is the composition.

Instrumentation as content.

This is how I approach most of my improv stuff, particularly coming from a multi-instrumentalist/DIY place. The choice of the instruments/devices is very much part of the creative process. I hadn’t formally considered this as part of my process before, but it was definitely there. It zooms out on the scope of my compositional thinking from being about interaction/form/memory to happening before any formal elements take place at all.

Before I say more, here is composition 1a from the series:

The seedling for this way of thinking was some recent collaborative experiments with honest and able violinist Linda Jankowska. She had me dust off my stringed-drum bits and was playing with that for a while. It got me thinking about how much an instrument/setup, particularly an esoteric one, lends itself to a certain kind of playing. What you do in context is, to an extent, articulating what you had in mind when you put those instruments together.

Shortly after Angela Guyton filmed her videos, I decided that I would make some videos of my own. I decided on the following setup:

At this point I hadn’t yet decided on using this as a compositional approach. It was just part of my creative process.

The title of the series of pieces is “Everything. Everything at once. Once.”.

I think it really suits this way of thinking about composition. I don’t know where this compositional approach begins and my normal creative process ends, but I don’t think I will compose a gigantic amount of these pieces. For now, it is something I am exploring.